Lucas Hubbard

As the magazine's staff writer, Lucas spends most of his time pitching, writing, and editing stories. A 2014 Duke graduate, he worked in DC and wrote for a number of sports websites prior to joining the magazine.

ARTICLES BY Lucas Hubbard

I started writing seriously seven years ago, and sometime in the intervening period, I became a procrastinator. Missing a deadline is a terrible, deep pit: At first, it’s to be avoided at all costs, and then, once experienced, it’s something never to be relived. And yet, I catch myself following the same patterns, flirting with the same disasters.

WE ASKED
Jane Sherron De Hart ’58, A.M. ’61, Ph.D. ’67, professor emerita of history at the University of California-Santa Barbara and author of Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (Knopf), about what she learned about Justice Ginsburg from decades of research and countless interviews with her. De Hart received the graduate school’s 2019 Distinguished Alumni Award.

Ryan Bergamini discusses “community” to a degree that the combination of his face and the word has become a meme. On East Campus, he’s the senior making signs that encourage the first-years in the dorm where he’s a resident assistant to become TROUTs (Trinity Residents Organizing a Unified Trinity, with the slogan stating that “TROUTs swim together”).

It’s a little scary to talk to an academic about the first time they have an idea,” says Esther Gabara, “because we kind of muddle things. You look at something in an archive; you have a spark here. You start working on other projects. It’s not this sort of straightforward process.”

The clip lasts just five minutes, but little about it seems right. Sure, Sandy Darity is talking about one of his ideas to combat the racial wealth gap, but absent are his laidback nature, his ubiquitous laugh. It’s July 2018, and Darity’s the guest on Bloomberg’s What’d You Miss? His posture and movement— hunched; fidgety—reflect a man aware of the stage and of the fact that he has brought his ideas, at least briefly, to the center of it.

Down to her bunned hair and the Perrier bottle at her fingertips, Sarah Riazati is an artist, and so she speaks with an artist’s precision: She doesn’t “shoot” so much as “film”; she prefers to “make” a picture rather than “take” one.

Busy” and its close cousins (“intense,” “crazy”) are how Leslie Marx ’89 likes to describe her schedule, yet it soon becomes apparent that her “busy” starts at a higher baseline than non-academics’. Her first e-mail notes that she’s in Shanghai teaching in the Global Executive M.B.A. program at the Fuqua School of Business, where Marx is the Robert A. Bandeen Professor of economics.

As the last months of Patrick Grady’s time at Duke wound down, and then the spring turned into summer and endless eighty-five-hour weeks in the Gross Hall basement’s cluttered and flourescent makerspace, his faith came from the formulas. “The math said that we could beat [the record], said Grady ’18, the then-president of Duke Electric Vehicles, “but there was a big gap between the math saying that and actually doing that.”

The Nasher Museum of Art was born in 2005, making it a toddler in the art world. That youth might seem like a hindrance. After all, a museum’s collection is what most defines it, and a collection tends to accrue steadily with the passage of time.

It’s 7 p.m., and David Shumate is missing his coffee.
He drinks it when he calls Duke games, even those with an evening kickoff, like tonight’s season opener against Army. But on the last night of August, it’s simply too stifling in the Blue Devil Tower booth; the retracted windows—essential to the ambient crowd noise on the radio broadcast—have invited in far too much of the Durham heat for anyone to enjoy a mug.

April is crunch time for college tennis teams, and for the top player on Duke’s men’s team, redshirt junior Nicolás Álvarez, to step away for a week during the cruelest month, it had to be for something important.He had to win a match for his country.

RECOMMENDATIONS from Rae DelBianco '14
In her debut novel Rough Animals (Arcade Publishing), DelBianco makes a powerful entrance to the contemporary Western genre, weaving the poetic and laconic tale of a man on a meandering journey through the Utah wilderness. Here, she shares the works that have inspired her on her own writing journey.

Sophomore Deepti Agnihotri remembers a story one of her classmates told last year about finding her significant other, a tale that culminates in her classmate proposing over the phone. Her reactions? “
A: That was so gutsy. B: I can’t imagine anyone in my generation doing that, ever,” she says. “And C: It’s just so cool to hear people’s experiences from a different time that I wouldn’t usually get.
“And now they’ve been married for over thirty-five years,” she says.

Most research labs at Duke have clear markings. A framed sign on the wall with a professor’s name; his or her own separate space protected from peons. But on the bottom floor of the Levine Science Research Center, only a crinkled sheet of printer paper— hanging from another lab’s entrance—gives away the Small Molecule Synthesis Facility.

Bob Weiseman stood in left field, waiting under a darkening sky. He looked worried, but that was typical: As associate director of athletics/ athletic facilities, game operations, and championships, Weiseman needs some degree of paranoia, a fussiness to drag the infield one more time, a critical eye to head off anything that could sully a playing surface.

For twin brothers Zach and Mitch Finesilver, an added pressure influences each wrestling practice: the fear of losing a bout to a family member.But it doesn’t really arise when they face each other. No, it’s when they wrestle one of their younger twin brothers.“I don’t wanna say I take it too far,” says Mitch, laughing. “But I’ll just…maybe throw an extra hard crossface or club, so they know who big brother is.”

Here’s an economics joke: One day, it goes, a student asks the professor if he believes the adage that economics is the “dismal science.” “Well, if you think our science is dismal,” the professor replies, “you should hear our poetry.”

To tell the story of Randy Jones ’92, you need to include two phone calls. The first came to his apartment at 1905 Erwin Road—walking distance from Uncle Harry’s General Store and the Central Campus pool—in the spring of 1991. The Dallas Cowboys wanted to chat about a possible tryout.

In the Duke Coffeehouse on East Campus, against a backdrop of glitzy streamers and dodecahedral disco balls, Serges Himbaza saunters around onstage, enlivening the feverish crowd. There are nine talented artists here tonight, he explains; they’ll each play two pieces. The audience—staring down both barrels at course registration, Family Weekend, and the fiery 2016 election—has earned an emotional outlet. Roars greet every song.

In February 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) re-classified broadband Internet as a Title II common carrier, meaning it prohibited Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from treating certain items differently from others—they couldn’t block, throttle, or prioritize content or traffic. This policy came to be known as “net neutrality.”

Karl M. von der Heyden ’62 led a storied career in business, holding C-level executive positions at H.J. Heinz Company, PepsiCo, and RJR Nabisco. But his youth is the subject of his new book, Surviving Berlin: An Oral History (MCP Books).

Go to Norway, and then head further north, three hours by plane. You’ll end up in Longyearbyen, the main settlement of the not-quite-sovereign archipelago of Svalbard. Formerly a mining town, Longyearbyen focuses now on tourism and climate research, an area of obvious interest, given its position in the Arctic. If you leave the settlement on foot, you’ll have to carry a rifle to protect against polar bears.

Erik Hanson has ten months at Duke, and by the second week of August, it’s clear he’s making the most of it.“I don’t want the coaching staff to be mad at me for staying up late, but…,” he says, laughing, before rattling off his robust daily schedule—training, an ice bath, two classes (“Intro to Financial Accounting” and “Quantitative Business Analysis”), a film session, a nutrition meeting, practice, and more schoolwork—a lineup that, all told, runs about sixteen hours.

Nearly thirty graduate students from around the Triangle listen intently in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences on a mid-August Saturday, trying to answer one pressing question: What is making that sound?

Inside one of Durham’s brick-faced, vestigial tobacco buildings, Nick Troester Ph.D. ’10 speaks quietly. “I don’t know that anyone at any point in time says, ‘You’re a failure if you don’t find a tenure- track job somewhere,’ but it’s an expectation that I think I had,” he says.

Baseball coaches communicate with players by using complex series of gestures, touching shoulders, hats, belts, elbows, noses, ears, to signal intention without alerting the opposing team. Duke volunteer assistant coach Jason Stein serves as the team’s hitting coach and during games calls signals as the third-base coach.
Interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

In "Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama," historian and author David Garrow Ph.D. '81 takes a detailed look at the formative years of the forty-fourth president. Garrow isn't new to writing big books. His "Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade" and "Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Leadership Conference" both were more than 800 pages.

The time during each baseball game that should be most leisurely— the half-inning break— is often the most stressful for Jack Labosky.“Sometimes it’s kind of a mad scramble during the game [when] I’m probably going to pitch,” says Labosky, a third-baseman and rising senior who doubles as Duke’s closer. “I’m coming off the field and Coach points at me and says, ‘Get hot, you’re going in,’ and I have to run to the bullpen.”

THE CATALYST: At the turn of the decade, Scott Huettel, professor of psychology and neuroscience, was pitching a course on neuroethics, the new field that merges neuroscience and ethics so that, in the wake of substantial advances in understanding how the brain works, we know what we should do with this information. When Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, now a philosophy professor at the university, joined Duke in 2010, it was an obvious opportunity.

Thamina Stoll ’17 is sharing the sort of story that has sentences like, “In the end, I know that everything will be okay,” right alongside, “You can’t fight the higher system.” It’s a complicated story with an uncertain ending.

On a mid-March afternoon in Room 101 of the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building, Panera catering boxes stack high at the front of the room, a half-filled jug of OJ and green coffee cups scattered about; clear trash bags swell with boxes that previously housed sandwiches.

It’s really hard to tell if you’re sleepy or confused,” Genevieve Lipp ’10, M.S. ’13, Ph.D. ’14 says to her EGR 244: “Dynamics” class at 9:07 a.m. on a Friday in mid-January. While her comment draws a few nervous laughs, it’s not an unfair claim.

THE CATALYST: Television isn’t a standard jumping-off point for an academic course. But The Wire, the acclaimed HBO series that ran from 2002 through 2008 and that Entertainment Weekly ranked as the best-ever TV show, isn’t standard television.

Some days are better than others,” says DeVon Edwards, sitting in the Yoh Football Center a week after knee surgery, his crutches propped against the adjacent chair. “Some days I wake up and it hurts, and I think, ‘I just don’t want to do anything.’ And I’m mad for no reason, and I wonder why I had to deal with this.”

THE CATALYST: Neurobiology professor—and amateur guitarist— Dale Purves has long been fascinated by music. While his research focuses on vision and visual perception, he also has delved into audition—first to confirm his visual findings in another sensory system, and then to explore the basis for the importance of music. “Music has a lot to say about audition because of the universal interest we human beings have in music and the relative absence of this interest in other animals.

Who should America's next president include in his or her cabinet?We suggest a few Blue Devils worthy of consderation.Vice President: Ken Jeong ’90. If Veep has taught us anything, the vice president merely needs to be entertaining; Jeong, the funnyman who starred in both Community and The Hangover, fits the bill. And if the candidates’ health is a concern, it can’t hurt to have Jeong, a licensed physician, close to the Oval Office.

Tonight, coming off a loss, the Duke women’s team is tasting the sick humor that makes soccer a sometimes infuriating game—at halftime, they’ve outshot their opponents twenty to one, but they hold just a one-nil lead.

To some, the word “Alaska” may evoke a Roosevelt-ian dreamland of an unforgiving Arctic and the ever-present opportunity to wrestle for your life against a bear. The four-week Duke in Alaska summer program is quite different, yet proper bear safety is a necessity.

THE CATALYST: In 2008, global-health professor Eve Puffer was a postdoctoral candidate at Duke and taught a small elective seminar on mental-health issues around the world. When she returned to the university in 2012 after conducting fieldwork in Kenya, interest (and concern) regarding global mental health—throughout academia and particularly at Duke—had exploded.